


I Listen, Will You?

by Anunkindraven



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Coach Finstock - Freeform, First Person, Gen, Hearing disability, Mentions of Mama Stalinski
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-18
Updated: 2013-01-18
Packaged: 2017-11-25 23:41:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/644187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anunkindraven/pseuds/Anunkindraven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles has hearing loss.  This is how he sees/hears life</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Listen, Will You?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [talktowater](https://archiveofourown.org/users/talktowater/gifts).



> This is for talktowater who suggested I write about what I know. This is a part of what I know.

My brain doesn’t work the same as other peoples.  It’s like I have autocorrect in my head editing everything that anyone ever says to me.  You know from your own experiences texting how annoying and sometimes funny that can be.

I have always had this problem.  I have always known that my ears and mind would fail me.  I have no idea what it is like to participate in the same conversation at the same time as other people do.  I always feel like I am at least one second behind everyone else.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m still the kid that quips back and makes funnies, but if I’m honest,  I’m never really certain that I’m making a joke about the right thing or if what I heard was wrong and I’m making a fool of myself. 

I rely on my sight probably more than most people to help me hear.  I do a little bit of lip reading.  It’s not great.  You can’t put me in a room with the television on and the volume down and expect me to tell you what they are saying, well at least not all of it.  I know small bits of sign language too, but only because when I was little everyone thought I was going to go full on deaf.  My parents even lined up a school for me to go to and were going to ship me to live with friends of theirs I barely knew.  Fortunately, my hearing stopped disappearing and leveled out.  Can you imagine being six and worrying that your folks are going to send you away to live with strangers?  They even sent me on a getting to know each other weekend.  I had to take the bus across the state by myself.  They told me that my “uncle” Charlie would be waiting outside the bus stop, so that I would know which one was the right one to get off on.  Lucky for me the bus driver was a nice guy and told me when my stop was, because my uncle Charlie was not waiting outside like he was supposed to.  In fact he was inside getting a coffee.  That trip had been so filled with anxiety and nerves; I think it’s why I don’t really like to travel.  I’m a homebody.  If I could live in Beacon Hills my whole life, I would be happy.

You know what I hear most often from the professionals in my life?  By that I mean doctors and teachers and once even my ear doctor before he did my hearing test.  They always tell me there is a difference between hearing and listening.  Like I don’t try to listen.  I get that to these ‘supposed’ professionals that I look like a punk ass teenage spastic.  They see the label ADHD and draw conclusions from it that I’m not paying attention.  Those that don’t know about the ADHD base it off of the way I dress and my age.    News flash, not every teenager doesn’t listen.  How they all judge me is wrong.   I know that there is a difference between listening and hearing, I can’t hear and I wish they would _listen_ to me when I tell them that. 

I think that my Mum was the only one that really got me.  She was the one that always made sure that she was looking at me when she talked to me.  She always made sure that her mouth wasn’t blocked by anything, not even her hair.  She also understood that sometimes my brain got words really, really wrong and that the most ridiculous things were occasionally heard by me, but not said by the speaker.  She would always somehow know when my brain and ears had failed me and asked what I thought the person had said.  She waited until we had walked far enough away so that no one was embarrassed, but we had a great laugh over it.  My mum never made me feel like it was a disability.  She always made it seem like a secret ongoing joke between her and I. 

When she died, all that just went away.  My Dad had a hard enough time dealing with my teachers and my ADHD issues.  He didn’t have time to fight battles for me about the hearing issues as well.  Nor did he have the time to listen to the silly things that my brain sometimes translated people saying.  Hell, half the time the things he said were thrown over his shoulder as he went out the door to get to work.  Somehow I was expected to catch what he said.  Sometimes I think he forgot I had hearing problems.  I think I started hanging out at Scott’s house after school on the nights my Dad would be going in for night shift, just so that I wasn’t there when he left and if he wanted to talk to me he would have to write down what he wanted to say in a message on the table.  It’s not only my lies and the werewolf thing that caused problems between me and my Dad.  Not that I didn’t know he loved me.  He does, fiercely.  It’s just my hearing problem always ends up making me feel isolated from people if they don’t make special efforts and since my Mum died, my Dad just doesn’t have that in him anymore.

Scott’s the only person living today that doesn’t get frustrated by me.  Not just at my inability to sit still, but also at my constant “huhs” and “I beg your pardons” or my head nodding like I’m hearing what he is saying even when I can’t.  There is just some inner patience in him which allows him to repeat things to me half a dozen times without getting the least bit frustrated.  I don’t know whether it’s because he and I have grown up together, so it’s instinct by now or what, but its part of why he’s my best friend.  Scott’s a great guy period.  Some people don’t think he’s smart, but he is.  He just doesn’t think well on the fly.  There are a lot of people like that.  It’s just because I’m really smart that people think he isn’t.  People ask me sometimes why I’m friends with Scott.  They always imply in some way that I could do better.  Really?  I can’t.  Scott is loyal (yes even when he’s Allison crazy), he is patient, he is caring, he never treats me like I’m broken or different, he always looks out for me and he never gets mad about how people treat him badly for being my friend.  There have been just as many people who tell Scott not to be friends with me because I’m a freak and a nerd etc.  They tell him that he could do better than me.  I think more people tell him that then they tell me.  Scott always tells them to fuck off.

Scott also takes surprisingly good notes in class that he lends me so that I can catch up on the things that the teacher said when they are facing the blackboard.  It’s not like they don’t know better.  The local hearing society actually comes in and speaks to each of my teachers every year about how best to situate me in the classroom and how NOT to speak to the blackboard etc.  I find that most the teachers just don’t listen.  I can’t wait until University (even though the idea of it kind of terrifies me too) because I have heard they have a whole bunch of things to help me cope with classes and my hearing issues.  Like fm systems where the teacher wears a mike that sends the lecture straight to a system I wear in my ears.  Also they have note takers they hire so that I can just listen.  There was something about infrared systems in certain lecture halls, but I haven’t read up enough about it yet.  But that’s all in my maybe future.  Let’s talk about the now or recent past.

I yell a lot or talk in excited utterances.  I can’t help it.  I can’t really hear the volume of my voice the way you can.  So I think I’m being quiet and my voice is probably normal.  I think I’m being normal and I’m probably loud.  I don’t even want to know what I am when I’m yelling.  The more excited I get, the louder I get.  I can’t even tell I’m doing it.  Don’t even get me started on how loudly the tv needs to be on for me to hear my programs.  The background music is always so loud and often blocks out what the person on screen is saying.  So frustrating.  Yes, sometimes I have to resort to using CC.  I don’t like to, because I don’t want people treating me like a freak.

So I figure you are sitting there trying to understand exactly how my head and ears and eyes process things together, so I’ll give you an example.  Once Scott told me that his girlfriend’s father “Shot him with a crossbow”.  My ears heard that her father shocked him with Nemo .  Don’t ask where my ears come up with this shit.  That’s like trying to figure out why your Iphone tells someone that you “Irish” them a happy New Year instead of “I wish” you a Happy New Year.  Autocorrect just hates you the same way the brainwaves that hear for me hate me.  But I digress.  So the next step in the process is that my eyes help my brain interpret the sentence to actually say that Alison’s dad “Shot him with Nemo”.  So when my brain tells me this is in fact what I “heard”, I start trying to figure out what can be shot that sounds a bit like Nemo and that is how I land on crossbow.  Of course it takes a moment or two and I probably stuttered about Scott being shot once or twice before figuring it all out.

Once time I heard Lydia talking about getting a pinterest account.  I know it’s some kind of posting site, nowhere as good as tumblr of course, and that it requires an invitation or something.  What really caught my attention about her conversation was when she started talking about laying pipe in relation to the site.  Suddenly I wanted to know more about it.  So I asked Allison figuring as a girl she might know more about this site where you pin things and lay pipe.  Turns out it is a hell of a lot more boring than I’d heard.  Yeah Lydia had been talking about creating hype, not laying pipe.  Whatever, I totally think my idea of a site where you pin things and lay pipe sounds a lot more interesting, though I suppose gay porn sites would argue that they have already been there and done that.

So... I bet you wonder how bad this can really be.  You figure there are people out there that have it far worse.  They can’t hear music to even complain about never being able to understand lyrics.  You are right.  There are people far worse off and I am far from saying that there aren’t.  I’m just saying that my life is different than yours and here’s how it’s different.  This....it’s about fostering understanding about me about my hearing, about my brain and about how the world doesn’t pay attention to disabilities it can’t see.  The thing is my hearing loss has had a big impact on not just my life, but on the lives of those around me.  Not sure you believe me?  Well let me tell you a story about the night my friend Scott and I went searching for a dead body.

There was a reason that I got caught by my Dad the night that Scott got bitten.  Anyone else would have heard the dog barking or my Dad’s footsteps so close to them, but not me.  Scott heard.  That’s why he was able to hide.  To me, it was like they came out of nowhere.  They startled me so much I fell to the ground.  When my dad asked me where my usual partner in grime was, I knew my ears hadn’t heard my Dad fully and had gotten it wrong and my brain was quick to supply the correct word crime (which of course makes a lot more sense) and I was able to quickly cover for Scott.  Maybe things would have been different if I hadn’t been so quick to figure out what my Dad had said.  Maybe if I had hesitated a minute longer my Dad would have sussed out my lie, found Scott and none of this werewolf stuff would have happened.  Maybe if I had heard my Dad and the dog I could have hidden and not been caught and Scott and I would have been together.  Maybe if we had been, he never would have been bitten.  Unfortunately for us all, we will never know.  My brain had gone back and sorted out where it had autocorrected wrongly just a little too quickly that night.  See.....it’s totally my fault what happened to Scott.

I’m not saying it’s all bad.  It really isn’t.  Sometimes it’s really, really funny.  There are some people that are impossible not to hear things wrong with.  Like Coach.  Coach is the worst for saying shit that I just can’t figure out.  The problem is that most of the things he says don’t make sense even if you CAN hear him correctly.  I mean who tells kids that everything else is cream cheese?  I mean that makes as much sense as saying everything else is green jeans…right?  There was this other time where he was ranting about wishing you had never been born  and I heard him say that we’d wish we were in porn.  I’d much rather misunderstand Coach then Harris, ya know?  Because Harris is an ass and would point out my mistake and he’d never let it go.  Coach, he’d just shake his head for a second, brush it off and carry on with whatever he was doing.

I really love clubs and dancing.  Most people think that since I have such problems hearing I should suck as a dancer, but the truth is that I feel the music through vibrations.  When people play music for parties or at clubs, they tend to do so with loud systems, big speakers and a pounding base.  Really in order to dance all you need to hear is the rhythm.  With the base and the big speakers there is usually a vibration either through the floor or in the air that you can feel.  That’s how I “hear” the rhythm and am able to dance.  Others might not agree, but I think I’m a pretty awesome dancer.  When we went out looking for the Kanima at the club?  It was awesome. Of course when Scott told me that everyone in the club was nude, I knew I’d heard him wrong.  I totally understood why...it wasn’t really the music (okay it probably was, but.....) it was Scott’s bad syntax.  I mean who uses the word dude twice in a sentence. 

Have I ever wished that my hearing was perfect?  I can’t say that I haven’t.  Peter would be able to tell you that I’m lying.  When he offered me that bite my hesitation wasn’t because I wanted to be a werewolf and super strong.  I really don’t want to be a werewolf.  I’m very happy being human.  But the lie was that some small part of me wondered whether the bite wouldn’t make my hearing better, whether it would make it normal.  But I brushed it off, because what is normal really and who wants to be that?  It sounds kind of boring.

I have tried hearing aids.  I’ve had three different kinds.  I’m lucky that they started having smaller ones when it was finally decided that I should get one.  They make all kinds of promises about what the hearing aid will do for you.  Besides helping you hear better, they are supposed to help filter out the background noise so that you hear what you are trying to listen to.  That never works out.  The first hearing aid I had sounded like it buzzed all the time.  It turns out that I was listening to the lights and computer noises.  It was very distracting and annoying.  Who knew that lights made noises?  Anyway, that noise was sooooo annoying that I wasn’t able to listen OR hear what the teachers were saying in class.  My next one when I tried a year later used to pick up all the conversations people were having around me and not the teacher who was at the front of the class.  Do you know how annoying it is to listen to girls ask to borrow midol and tampons, or to listen to Jackson brag about what he and Lydia got up to or worse to listen to Lydia wax poetic about Jackson’s ‘athletic’ build?  It’s terrible.  I couldn’t stand it.  I stopped wearing them.  The thing is that hearing aids aren’t cheap.  They cost my dad around $1,000 each time.  I feel bad that they sit on my bookshelf gathering dust, but if that is the kind of stuff that you guys hear every day, then I’m happy to have a natural filter that sees to it I don’t hear it.

I think what my hearing loss has taught me is the silver lining principle.  Yes it sucks not to hear lyrics and to be able to wax on about certain riffs in music etc, but it is also fun to make up your own lyrics, or to look them up online and see its poetry.  It’s being able to feel the music because I can’t listen for it.  It’s being able to never hear those mean comments being said behind your back, even though you know that they are being said, at least you don’t hear the words.  It’s the way that it helps me from having more distractions because I can’t hear all the noises being made around me.  It’s how people I care about or who care about me have more heartfelt conversations because we have them face to face, not looking at or being distracted by other things.

I could look at it as a curse.  I suppose some would.  If I’m honest, sometimes I do, but mostly I look at it as a blessing.  It helped shape the person I am, the person I hope to become.  So what do I hope you get from this?  Maybe the next time you are talking to someone, really talk to them.  Put your phone away and look them in the face while you talk.  You might be surprised at the connection it brings you.  Also, don’t assume that because you can’t see it, that people you know aren’t actually disabled.  Some of us are just really great at hiding it, coping with it or something.  I do hope that by writing this, I am beginning to find a way of claiming it, owning it and celebrating it.  

**Author's Note:**

> I like comments. Comments are lovely. I also don't own Teen Wolf or any of it's characters. I do own most of the things heard by Stiles in this story. The laying pipe thing was totally something I heard. 
> 
> Thanks for reading my universe!
> 
> Constructive criticism is always welcome.


End file.
